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I opened https://meta.stackexchange.com/legal/moderator-agreement/versions/3 and this was displayed:

Page not found error

What happened to the Moderator Agreement V3?

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    At first I figured that's an obsolete agreement and therefore not accessible anymore, but v4 is accessible, with a clear notification that "This moderator agreement is not in effect". So why not keep v3 up, as well, indeed?
    – Joachim
    Commented Aug 3 at 11:00
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    Since it's the weekend and we may get bored waiting for a response, you can use the WayBack machine to view source of various snapshots of the moderator agreement from the past, and perform a diff to spot changes. So far, I've mostly only noticed grammar/active voice changes, or at least nothing worthy of hiding. I suspect it's not gone, just... misplaced. We should ask, though, for the current agreement to link directly to all past versions. Commented Aug 3 at 12:17
  • (It also became much more formal at some point in the past year; for example, Stack -> Stack Exchange, Inc..) Commented Aug 3 at 12:19
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    I asked Mithical about this in chat last month, and their response was that it "technically exists in the system but was never rolled out and used". Commented Aug 3 at 19:02
  • @SonictheAnonymousHedgehog Thanks for the info. Let's see if company can post an official answer to this question. Commented Aug 4 at 3:50
  • There are, in fact, multiple other versions. As is required by the moderator agreement, and has been required since version 2 of the agreement, moderators have been given "at least thirty days for discussion and review in the Stack Moderators Teams instance", which did result in changes.
    – Makyen
    Commented Aug 4 at 7:19

1 Answer 1

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I asked about this when the latest Moderator Agreement (v5) was rolled out. While I can't quote the exact response, since it was in a moderator-only space, the answer is in essence that /versions/3 is a version of the Agreement that was put into the codebase, but was never rolled out and used. I'm unclear if it's actually visible to staff in the system. As far as anyone's aware, no moderators ever agreed to that version, and it was never made publicly available, but it was decided to go to the next number just in case anyway, to avoid any ambiguity with reusing version numbers.

I was unable to find any info in the Mod Team about what this version may have been - there don't seem to be any drafts or discussion of a possible update between V2 being rolled out in 2020 and the changes we negotiated in 2023 / the other updates made from V2 to V5. My only guess is that this had something to do with the now-defunct Moderator Council.

For clarity, V4 is almost identical to V5, with the exception of one paragraph. That paragraph had been a source of contention due to its ambiguity, and in the end it was rewritten to remove the ambiguity while restraining its applicability to only cases where moderators were involved in their moderator capacity. The text was updated in the draft on the Mod Team, but an error was made when rolling it out live, and that paragraph still displayed the old text.
Since a small number of moderators had already agreed to V4, changing the text necessitated a new version of the Agreement and re-acceptance by anyone who had agreed to V4 in addition to all the mods who had signed V2. Any change to the text of Agreement means that every moderator must re-accept the terms.

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    It would be nice if the link mentioned by the OP were to lead to a page where this is pointed out, or maybe even leads back to this very "thread".
    – Joachim
    Commented Aug 20 at 17:24

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